Grace Garden Preschool

Dear Caterpillar Families,
What a lovely week we've had in the Caterpillar room!  Our main order of business was celebrating Moms this week, and the Caterpillars enjoyed talking about all of the hard work that their moms do for them.  There were lots of comments about moms doing laundry, cleaning the house, making dinner, and packing lunches, but the Caterpillars all agreed that the best thing that moms do for us is love us!  We welcomed moms into our classroom on Wednesday morning for a "Muffins with Moms" breakfast.  Children are always so proud to be able to show off their classroom to a parent, and it was nice to see our room filled with so much love!

Our big project this week was to make Mother's Day gifts.  The Caterpillars learned about glass artist Dale Chihuly and saw a sampling of his work.  They were amazed to see how glass could be melted and worked into different shapes.  To imitate the style of Chihuly, the Caterpillars painted plastic soda bottles and then watched as Ms. Elle used a heat gun to transform the bottles into beautiful flowers.  The melted pieces of plastic really did look like glass!  The shapes and colors of each child's flower was unique, calling to mind our Caterpillar motto:  Everyone's will look a little bit different, and that's the way we like it!   The Mother's Day gift was finished off by adding coupon leaves to the bouquet of flowers.  We wish each and every Caterpillar mom a wonderful Mother's Day!  Thank you for sharing your precious children with us!

Next week, our official unit will be Solar System, but our real work will center around getting ready for Caterpillar Graduation on Friday night!  We will be busy working on the beautiful butterfly wings that will signal the Caterpillars' transformation and readiness for Kindergarten.  It will be another busy week, I am sure!

Have a wonderful weekend,
Ms. Katie and Ms. Elle

Dear Caterpillar Families,

This week the Caterpillars dove right in to our Ocean unit!  The children enjoyed sharing their own personal ocean experiences during circle time in addition to playing with and exploring ocean creatures in the sensory table.  We also used watercolor paints to paint the beginnings of our jellyfish which we'll finish up next week.  The Caterpillars have been practicing a lot recently with watercolor paints and it really shows!  They are using artistic techniques with the paints which are also lessons in following directions and patience.  The results are gorgeous!  We look forward to seeing the jellyfish floating around our classroom next week.  

It was also Zz week in our room and, although the Show are Share offerings have dwindled the last few weeks, we still managed to have a couple of Zz activities.  Our very last alphabet page, Zipper, was completed and we followed a recipe to make Zebra cake on Friday.  

We are looking forward to our Parent-Teacher Conferences on Monday and are excited to share your child's progress with you!  It's hard to believe it's this time of year again when we look forward to big transformations in the Caterpillar class!  Next week we'll continue our unit on Ocean and also celebrate moms with our Muffins with Moms breakfast on Wednesday.

Have a great weekend!

Love,
Ms. Katie and Ms. Elle

There was a lot of talk in the Caterpillar room this week about ways to care for the planet Earth.  Our Caterpillars sure know a lot about recycling, reducing waste, and reusing materials!

On Tuesday we read Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran.  This is a fun story about a pretend town made by children out of rocks and boxes.  This really got us talking about how we can use reuse materials in a new way for a new purpose.  Our letter of the week was "Y" and we used yarn to create our letters to display on the alphabet wall.  We enjoyed spending some time outside collecting acorns which we used for acorn math and sorting.  The children had great fun exploring water levels with the water treatment plant we built in the sensory table.  
 
On Wednesday we read The Lorax by Dr. Seuss and made paper mâché earths which are now rotating around our class room.  The children worked so hard to form their planet using blue for water and green for earth.  Did you know much of the Earth's surface is covered by water?  This was surprising news for many of our Caterpillars!  We also learned from our weekly reader how to reduce reuse, and recycle.
 
On Thursday we added pumps to our water treatment plant, read Bartholomew and the Oobleck and Where does the Garbage go, and made water color Earths which are rotating in the hallway.  The sensory table was a place for much awe and amazement this week, as the Caterpillars poured water through the tubes and discovered how the water pump works.
 
On Friday we baked Golden Yam Brownies and read This is our Earth.  We practiced our sight words and had many rousing rounds of who let the letters out.  It was a busy week!  We are looking forward to next week when we will be learning about all the mysteries of the ocean.

See you Tuesday!
Ms. Katie and Ms. Elle

Dear Caterpillar Families,

This week was weather and the Caterpillars were certainly treated to some!  Although we were rained out from the playground on Wednesday, we still managed to pack our week with fun and learning about the weather.  The Caterpillars experimented with watercolor, played with prisms to create rainbows, learned about the water cycle, created a tornado in a bottle and played with Cloud Dough.  It was also Xx week and although there weren't many words to put on the list, we still managed to get some eXcellent work in with an X-ray alphabet and making Hot X Buns on Fun Friday.

The most exciting news in the room was that our butterflies emerged!  When we arrived Tuesday morning, there were three butterflies fluttering around inside the net.  They were eating the nectar from the crushed grapes that we put at the bottom of the enclosure, and the Caterpillars were able to see the curly proboscis in action.  It seemed as if the fourth chrysalis wasn't viable, so we observed the three for awhile and then released them outside.  But then, later that afternoon, we were treated to a huge surprise:  the fourth butterfly emerged after all!  It was a wonderful reminder that not everything (or everyone) moves at the same speed.  We are all different, and that's the way we like it!  Our fourth butterfly had the suite all to herself for the day and we released her on Friday afternoon.

Next week we will celebrate Earth Day!  Have a wonderful weekend,
Ms. Katie and Ms. Elle  

Dear Caterpillar Families,
 
It has been a super exciting week for the Caterpillars!  Our unit was Transportation and our library center was overflowing with books about trains, boats, race cars, construction vehicles, monster trucks, and more!  Some of the favorites were The Bus For Us by Suzanne Bloom, Busy Boats by Tony Mitton and Ant Parker, Truck Song by Diane Siebert, and The Wheels on the Truck by Steve Metzger.  We also read the amazingly imaginative and playful book, If I Built A Car by Chris van Deusen, which inspired some creative design plans for the Caterpillars.  They used recycled materials to design their own "dream" vehicles and then wrote about them.  

Speaking of writing, the Writing Center has seen a lot of action recently.  The Caterpillars are really flexing their writing muscles by writing letters and note cards to friends and family.  They are learning how to use the Word Wall to find their friends' names, popcorn words, and commonly used words like "To," "From," and "Love."  We watch with amazement at their progress and it truly reminds us that these Caterpillars are about to spread their wings as butterflies!
 
Wheel Day was an amazing success.  The Caterpillars created license plates for their ride-on toys, and were delighted and proud to show them off to their teachers and classmates.  The Fellowship Hall was decked out like a racetrack with checkered flag banners and traffic signs.  The Caterpillars enjoyed riding round and round, and when they got tired, they played with train tracks and a car table, or read books.  Our St.
Jude's fundraiser was also very successful, with the Caterpillar class alone raising over $400!  

Next week, our unit will be Weather.  Hopefully we'll have some nice Spring weather to get us in the mood!
 
Love,
Ms. Katie and Ms. Elle

Dear Caterpillar Families,

This week, the Caterpillars welcomed some special guests to enliven our insect unit: 
five growing caterpillars and a dozen or so live ladybug larvae.  All week long the children watched in amazement as the caterpillars grew and grew and finally climbed to the top of their container to hang upside down and begin their grand transformation.  Just as entertaining was watching the ladybug larvae crawl around in their habitat, and wondering how something that looks like that could transform into a ladybug!  To add to their understanding of these insect life cycles, we read Ladybugs: Red, Fiery, and Bright by Mia Posada and From Caterpillar to Butterfly by Deborah Heiligman.  We can hardly wait to come back to school next week to observe more changes!

We also enjoyed some other books featuring insects as the main characters.  Toestomper and the Bad Butterflies by Sharleen Collicott was a fun story about a little critter who makes friends with some caterpillars and loves them through all of their changes.  And what discussion of insects would be complete without a reading of the perennial classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle?  Our very own Caterpillars brought the story to life with their painted finger caterpillars and beautiful story boards created by Ms. Elle.  Acting out a story is a wonderful way to enhance story comprehension and fluent reading.

We held caterpillar races to work on some math/science skills like measuring and recording data.  The students took turns winding up toy caterpillars and letting them race, while other students were in charge of recording how many inches each wind-up toy travelled. Activities like these are so great in the classroom because they give an opportunity to practice so many emerging skills:  fine motor development in winding up the toy, measuring with a tape measure, written expression of numerals, and patience waiting for their turn.  We are always, always working on patience!  

Next week our unit of play will be Transportation.  We will have Wheel Day on Thursday, April 11th, and we are excited this year to combine that event with a fundraiser for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.  We hope to raise some money for a great cause while having fun and learning about bike safety!  

Have a wonderful weekend!

Love,
Ms. Katie and Ms. Elle

Dear Caterpillar Families,
 
The Caterpillars celebrated the true beginning of Spring this week by talking about our feathered friends, Birds!  The children were captivated by labeled pictures of all sorts of birds which were hung by the writing center.  They enjoyed writing notes to themselves, family and friends, many of them including the names of the birds.  It's quite wonderful and amazing to see these Caterpillar's fine motor skills "taking
flight" lately! We had quite a few books to read this week about birds.  Ms. Elle brought in an incredible book called Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song featuring audio snippets of actual bird songs from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  The Caterpillars loved hearing the actual sounds of birds, and were quick to learn the process of typing in the correct code to match the pictures in the book.  Other books that we enjoyed this week were Owl Moon by Jane Yolen, Are You My Mother? by P.D.
Eastman, Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile by Tomie dePaola, and Feathers for Lunch by Lois Ehlert. 

The Caterpillars also got crafty with the bird theme.  On Wednesday, they spent most of the morning creating bird nest baskets out of cloth mache.  First they selected several pieces of cloth strips, and then applied fabric glue with a paintbrush to saturate the pieces.  They especially enjoyed the fact that, unlike with most projects where we tell them to use just a little bit of glue, they were able to use lots and lots and LOTS of glue to get the cloth strips to stick to the basket form.  Once dry, the cloth strips were stiff and we were able to pop the basket off of the form.  Amazing!  We'll have fun with these baskets next week as we celebrate the upcoming Easter holiday.  On Thursday morning, the Caterpillars used pieces cut from construction paper to create their own unique birds.  There was lots of creativity on display and the birds they made will now be a part of our Spring mural that we began last week.  

We've also been adding lots of popcorn words to the writing center. This week we added the words, was, in, and it.  We talked about the difference between "is" which we use when we're talking about something that's happening right now, and "was" which we use when we're talking about something that already happened.  The magic of learning to read is at work in the Caterpillar room!  It gives me goosebumps every single time.  
 
Next week we'll be talking about Easter.  Our egg hunt will be on Thursday afternoon.  Hope to see you there!
 
Love,
Ms. Katie and Ms. Elle
 

Dear Caterpillar Families,

Dear Caterpillar Families,
 
It was a Real Roundup this week as we celebrated Texas and Rr week in the Caterpillar room.  Our week started off with a day filled with outside time.  After such a windy Monday, the Caterpillars seemed more like wild mustangs who were feeling too corralled and needed to run!  Although we spent much of the day outside, the Caterpillars still managed to generate quite an impressive list of Rr words and create their alphabet page by paving a letter R with roadway and adding cars to it.  

On Wednesday, we read Armadillo Rodeo by the amazing Jan Brett.  Ms. Elle created beautiful pieces from the story and acted it out on a large board for the students.  The board and story pieces were then opened as a Dramatic Play station at Center time, and the Caterpillars loved telling and re-telling the story of Bo the armadillo, who mistakes a cowgirl's beautiful red boots for another armadillo. Like all of Jan Brett's books, the illustrations on each page offer different points of view in the story, and clues to predict what might happen next.  They offer an amazing opportunity to practice the important literacy skills of re-telling and prediction, both of which are integral to story comprehension.  

To further round out our unit on Texas/Cowboys, the Caterpillars panned for gold in the sensory table by sifting through wet sand to search for the glittering pieces of "gold".  They also created cactuses, complete with flowers and prickles, which are now on display in the hallway, and Texas flag windsocks.  In music, the Caterpillars enjoyed singing "Deep in the Heart of Texas," and wailing like coyotes and bawling like 'doggies'.  Although neither Ms. Katie nor Ms. Elle are native Texans, there was plenty of Texas pride on display in the Caterpillar room!  

Next week, our attention will turn to Springtime!  Have a wonderful, relaxing weekend.  

Love,
Ms. Katie and Ms. Elle

Dear Caterpillar Families,


This week, the Caterpillars were all smiles with our unit on Dental Health! From Ms. Elle’s “Mr. Mouth” puppet to play-doh dentistry, the Caterpillars dove right in to the activities this week. The biggest hit of the week was the exciting “egg”speriment that the Caterpillars conducted. They placed hard-boiled eggs in several different jars of liquid (coffee, tea, vinegar, fruit punch, soda, and water as a control) and then made predictions about what would happen to the eggs inside. With hypotheses ranging from, “The egg will crack” to “There will be a tooth inside the egg,” the Caterpillars really put their brains to work and practiced some higher level thinking skills, just like real scientists do! We then created a graph of their predictions. When we checked back the next day, the Caterpillars were astonished to see that the eggs that were submerged in dark liquid (coffee, tea, and coke) had stained shells. Coke was the worst culprit of them all, creating an egg that was very dark. Even the fruit punch colored the egg shell! After checking back with their original predictions, the Caterpillars set to work brushing away the stains with toothpaste and toothbrushes, revealing the clean white shell underneath. What an amazing real-life experiment for them to see just how effective tooth-brushing is! Some wonderful books rounded out our Healthy Teeth unit: The Dentist from the Black Lagoon by Mike Thaler, Tooth Trouble by Jane Clark and Cecilia Johansson, and What I Can Do To Take Care of My Teeth by the Creative Caterpillars themselves!

In honor of Qq week, the Caterpillars created a new page for their alphabet book: Q for Quilt. They also learned about quinoa, a grain-like seed that grows in the mountains, and that was once the food of warriors! They then cooked up some quinoa and used it as the base ingredient in a creative and healthy snack. They were able to add additional ingredients of their choice to customize their snack (apples, raisins, blueberries, pineapple, yogurt), and happily added a dollop of whip cream and a cherry on top to finish it up. Yum! After finishing their snack, the Caterpillars “wrote” their own individual recipes by filling in a picture graph of which ingredients they used. 

Parents, please remember to sign your child in and out each day! Also, please make sure your child has a set of weather-appropriate clothes in his/her cubby in case of accidents or messes. Next week’s unit will be Texas/Cowboys, and it’ll be a rip-roarin’ good time! Have a wonderful weekend.

With Love,
Ms. Katie and Ms. Elle